1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of ovens, in particular culinary ovens, of individual type, for example for equipping the home, of communal type, for example for a school or company canteen, or else industrial, for the preparation of cooked dishes in the food processing field.
2. Description of the Related Art
The cooking of foods requires extensive and varied culinary knowledge, and poses problems concerned with the adjustment of temperature and the monitoring of cooking, on account of the considerable modifications of appearance and of taste that they are liable to undergo.
For example, the cooking of red meat, such as roast beef, is one of the trickiest ones. The user or the consumer may want to cook to “very rare”, “rare” or “medium rare”, also termed “well done”. The difference in temperature between these three types of cooking right in the middle of a joint of roast beef is of the order of 1 or 2° C.
Conventionally, an oven is equipped with a button for adjusting the temperature with thermostatic or electronic type regulation. Certain ovens are equipped with a cooking mode selector based on a mechanical switch or electronic selector for choosing a degree of humidity inside the oven. Finally, a mechanical or electronic timer makes it possible to control the end of cooking.
However, these controls require skill by the user who must, if desirous of ensuring quality cooking, be fully aware of how to adjust the setting for cooking mode, for temperature and for duration to be applied as a function of the type of product, of the quality of the product and of the oven load, that is to say of the quantity of product placed in the oven.
Furthermore, high quality cooking often requires different cooking phases, which ensure the coloration of the product, that it cooks right through to the middle and that its temperature is maintained, these being difficult to achieve by simple control on account of the knowledge that the user must possess and of the multiple interventions on the control buttons of the oven when cooking is in progress.
Certain more advanced ovens allow storage of cooking programmes with automatic sequencing of various phases, with for each phase a specified temperature preset, a specified duration and a specified mode of cooking. Each programme then corresponds to a type of product.
However, each programme builds in settings adjusted by the manufacturer which, although the manufacturer regards them as ideal, do not necessarily give rise to cooking that is to the user's taste. For example, a joint of roast beef may turn out to be too coloured, too dry, not rare enough, etc. The user is then led to create a new programme presumed to improve the disputed characteristic.
As before, the user must then be fully aware of the product and the way of cooking it, in order to know which cooking phase to modify as well as which control, temperature, duration, mode of cooking, etc.
In practice, the user must fully master the generation of a new programme and perform multiple trials, often leading to their giving up, this being, moreover, time consuming and carrying the risk that certain products to be cooked may be rendered inedible.